Designing your Own WordPress Themes with Genesis Framework

I have long been a fan of Genesis for creating robust and unique websites, either completely from scratch, or from one of their many child themes. I have used it on a number of sites that I have built for my clients and like it’s ease of use.

However, for anyone who has never delved into theme design before, it may be a little daunting with the amount of work needed to create a unique, custom theme.

Thankfully, the awesome people at Studiopress (the creators of the Genesis framework) just released a 44-page tutorial booklet to help you with every aspect of creating your own Genesis-powered theme. And since they’re just trying to help you understand how to make the most out of their existing products, they have released it free of charge.

The guide covers topics from the very basics to much more advanced topics, so to give you an idea of what’s included, I’ve listed the main chapters in the guide:

Introduction to Genesis

Installing Genesis and a child theme

Genesis settings

How Home Pages Work

Widget Areas

Included Widgets

Logo/Header

Genesis Templates

Upgrading Genesis

Additional Resources

Troubleshooting

I’ve long admired the coding and UI work that Studiopress have carried out and that has carried over into this guide; the tutorials are well laid out and written for all to understand.

If you’ve been wanting to create your own custom theme, this may be the perfect place to start. If you’re not fully convinced, just download the guide that they’ve written so that you can see the level of effort involved. Then if you’re convinced, you can always buy Genesis and get to building your first custom theme.

Wow! Dave,
Thanks for sharing this information! I am beginning to see more and more why so many people love the Genesis Theme! As of this writing, I only use Thesis Theme. That’s all I’ve used for the last two years and it has served me well, but I do truly wish that they had a guide that would let me know how to create my own “skins” or child themes. Well, they’re supposed to come out with Thesis Theme 2.0 In the meantime, thanks for sharing all this useful information for Genesis users or for anyone considering moving to Genesis!

Yeah, Thesis isn’t bad, but it’s more “techy” in my opinion, where Genesis is more lightweight and “clean”. You can see the differences in the appearance of both. Just a personal preference though; both are excellent frameworks.

I just jumped on Genesis, but I’m still trying to find a tutorial out there that helps with going from a Photoshop file to Genesis. I know how to code out a PSD to MY specs, but I want to know best practices for coding out to Genesis’ specs. This guide just seems to be an intro to using Child Themes with Genesis,

Well, coding from any PSD to any WP theme, requires knowing the size of all the elements, which can be done in Photoshop by slicing, or from the theme by using Developer Tools in Chrome, or Firebug in Firefox. There’s nothing particularly special about the process for converting PSD to Genesis over any other theme.

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